“Full-time-equivalent” is intended to mean “if you were working full-time, this is how much funding you would receive”. The fellowship is intended for people working significantly less than full-time, and most of our grants have been for 15 hours per week of organizer time or less. I definitely don’t expect undergraduates to be organizing for 40 hours per week.
I think our page doesn’t make this clear enough early on, thanks for flagging it– I’ll make some changes to try and make this clearer.
I think anyone who’s doing student organizing for more than 5 hours per semester should strongly consider applying. I’m sympathetic to people feeling weird about this, but want to emphasize that I think people should consider applying even if they would have volunteered to do the same activities, for two reasons:
I think giving people funding generally causes them to do higher-quality work.
I think receiving funding as an organizer makes it clearer to others that we value this work and that you don’t have to make huge sacrifices to do it, which makes it more likely that other people consider student organizing work.
We’re up for funding any number of organizers per group– in the case you described, I would encourage all the organizers to apply. (We also let group leaders ask for funding for organizers working less than 10 hours per week in their own applications. If two of the organizers were working 10 hours per week or less, it might be faster for one organizer to just include them on their application.)
ii)
(Let me know if I’m answering your question here, it’s possible I’ve misunderstood it.)
I think it’s ultimately up to the person on what they want to do– I think the fellowship will generally allow more freedom than funding for a specific project, come with more benefits (see our program page), and would probably pay a higher rate in terms of personal compensation than many other funding opportunities would. It also has a much higher bar for funding than I would generally apply for funding specific projects.
In the application form, we ask people if they would be interested in receiving a separate grant for their project or plans if they weren’t offered the Century Fellowship– we’ve funded many applicants who were below the bar for the fellowship itself that way. So if someone’s interested in both, I think it makes sense to just apply to the Century Fellowship, and we can also consider them for alternative funding.
For both programs, we don’t have an explicit referral system, but we do take into account what references have to say about the applicant (if the applicant provides references).
i)
“Full-time-equivalent” is intended to mean “if you were working full-time, this is how much funding you would receive”. The fellowship is intended for people working significantly less than full-time, and most of our grants have been for 15 hours per week of organizer time or less. I definitely don’t expect undergraduates to be organizing for 40 hours per week.
I think our page doesn’t make this clear enough early on, thanks for flagging it– I’ll make some changes to try and make this clearer.
I think anyone who’s doing student organizing for more than 5 hours per semester should strongly consider applying. I’m sympathetic to people feeling weird about this, but want to emphasize that I think people should consider applying even if they would have volunteered to do the same activities, for two reasons:
I think giving people funding generally causes them to do higher-quality work.
I think receiving funding as an organizer makes it clearer to others that we value this work and that you don’t have to make huge sacrifices to do it, which makes it more likely that other people consider student organizing work.
We’re up for funding any number of organizers per group– in the case you described, I would encourage all the organizers to apply. (We also let group leaders ask for funding for organizers working less than 10 hours per week in their own applications. If two of the organizers were working 10 hours per week or less, it might be faster for one organizer to just include them on their application.)
ii)
(Let me know if I’m answering your question here, it’s possible I’ve misunderstood it.)
I think it’s ultimately up to the person on what they want to do– I think the fellowship will generally allow more freedom than funding for a specific project, come with more benefits (see our program page), and would probably pay a higher rate in terms of personal compensation than many other funding opportunities would. It also has a much higher bar for funding than I would generally apply for funding specific projects.
In the application form, we ask people if they would be interested in receiving a separate grant for their project or plans if they weren’t offered the Century Fellowship– we’ve funded many applicants who were below the bar for the fellowship itself that way. So if someone’s interested in both, I think it makes sense to just apply to the Century Fellowship, and we can also consider them for alternative funding.
For both programs, we don’t have an explicit referral system, but we do take into account what references have to say about the applicant (if the applicant provides references).